What Happens in Post Production…

… stays in the film… for-ever. Which is troublesome when what happens in editing and post-production is what happened to Snow White and the Huntsman. Which must haunt actors, editors, camera operators, and everyone else subject to the pressure of studios and of directors. (I don’t know who’s to blame in this case: director Rupert Sanders I’ve never heard of before, so it may not be his fault — or it just may — but someone really screwed up the film.) Not that I had very high expectations for the film in the first place (Chris Hemsworth has not yet really …

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Movies I’ve Seen Recently

I’ve seen a few movies recently that I liked, or thought were interesting: The Avengers: Yeah, it’s Joss Whedon. I do love some of his stuff; others, not so much. I think he did a fine job on this movie, but I was not as blown away by it as other people I know. It was fun, but not so fun I felt I needed to see it again. (Though maybe I could be talked into seeing it in IMAX.) I think, though, the bottom line for me was that not only was Loki just kind of unexciting as a …

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Politics and The Hunger Games

I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by …

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How Anti-Science Religious Fanatics Ruined Disney’s Fantasia

Don’t get me wrong, Fantasia’s a great cartoon for what it is. But the “Rite of Spring” section is marred, in one way I knew about already, but also in another way that I didn’t know about until just now. The way I knew about is the music: Stravinsky objected — and quite rightly — to the performance, which isn’t quite right — but especially to the changes they made to the music: cuts, rearrangement of material, and so on. But that’s the price you pay for mass media entertainment, and the big bucks, I guess. The other marring is …

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Blackface, Korean Media, and the Context of the American Vaudeville Show

Apparently, there has been an explosion online regarding an incident in which Korean performers donned  blackface for a performance over the Lunar New Year: Yeah. And this isn’t all that rare in Korean media. In fact, Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling hits the highlights with an excellent and carefully-researched history of Three Decades of Blackface in Korea, though it’s not an exhaustive history — he doesn’t get into every example. Just the big ones, and especially those in programs (as opposed to in advertisements). Like, for example, the all-Korean production of Roots here. Yeah, seriously. Go give it …

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